Momentum Grows for Greener
Way of Farming

<www.gristmagazine.org>
by Hal Clifford
28 Sep 2001

Rice as rice can be.In the humid hills of China's Yunnan province, rice
farmers make their living from plots of land smaller than many American
yards. High, cool, and wet, the country here is rich, yielding almost a
thousand pounds of rice per acre. But farmers face a perennial scourge: rice
blast.

Rice blast is caused by a fungus that cuts off nutrients to the rice seed
head and destroys crops. It thrives in rice monocultures and particularly
favors the short-grained, or sticky, strains of rice that bring the highest
price at Yunnan's markets. By 1998, many farmers had given up growing
sticky rice altogether, even though there was significant market demand.
That's when researchers from Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming began
attending village meetings in Jianshu and Shiping counties. They explained
how a local farmer had almost no rice blast when he mixed his crops,
planting rows of sticky rice between rows of long-grain rice. Although
monocultures were susceptible to the blast, mixed plantings seemed to resist
it. Oh, blast! The fungus leaves its mark in a paddy.

That year, hundreds of other farmers adopted the technique, planting 1,800
acres in mixed rows. Sticky rice yields per acre skyrocketed, jumping 89
percent, and blast almost disappeared. By the end of 1999, many farmers in
the two counties had stopped using expensive (and toxic) fungicides to
control blast. Overall yields were up by about 17 percent, and costs were
down. This year, more than 224,000 acres of Chinese rice paddies are being
planted with mixed rows.

The success was summed up by a farmer who said, "More rice, more money."
But it was more than that: The mixed plantings were also much better for the
environment. No longer were the rice paddies a toxic, fungicide soup. This
double-whammy benefit underlies "ecoagriculture," an emerging strategy that
blends farming and environmentalism.

Old MacDonald Had an Eco-farm

"There's been a history of adversarial relations," says Sarah Lynch, senior
program officer in the Center for Conservation Innovation at the World
Wildlife Fund. "But I think a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that
many farmers love nature and wildlife, and under other circumstances, they'd
be called environmentalists."

Lynch has worked for several years with Wisconsin potato farmers to reduce
their ecological footprint while improving their earnings. Hers is the sort
of project that attracted the attention of the Swiss-based World
Conservation Union (IUCN) and the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group
Future Harvest, which recently released a joint report on ecoagriculture
called "Common Ground, Common Future."

The problem is straightforward: Farming is one of the leading threats to
biodiversity. Clearing of forestlands for pasture and crops, farming on
marginal lands, herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and habitat
fragmentation all degrade biodiversity. Yet, demand for food is rising -- as
much as 60 percent more will be needed by 2030, according to one projection.

So what to do about all this? Enter ecoagriculture. The idea behind
ecoagriculture is to rearrange market incentives so that farmers can make
more money and feed more people, while protecting biodiversity and providing
other "ecosystem services," the term used by economists to sum up the
benefits of clean air, clean water, open space, and so on.
Coffee made in the shade.

Some of this is happening already; you can pay extra at your grocery store
for shade-grown coffee, which provides habitat to migratory songbirds. Lynch
sees real potential in this sort of consumer-driven demand for value-added
food products. Just as consumers pay a premium for organic beef and
dolphin-free tuna, encouraging ranchers and fishers to do good by the
environment, so can they also play a role in rewarding farmers who do the
same.

This strategy is a shift away from the top-down mandate -- the sort of
government interference devoutly resented by many people and epitomized by
the strictures of the U.S. Endangered Species Act -- and toward a
market-oriented approach to conservation. "I think there's a misconception
that farmers are not conservationists," says Sara Scherr, a fellow at Forest
Trends, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. Scherr wrote "Common Ground,
Common Future" with Jeff McNeely, a researcher with the World Conservation
Union.

What farmers aren't willing to do, Scherr says, is "sacrifice their
livelihood for conservation."

Show Me the Money

"People want to farm this way," McNeely says. "We're not going strongly
against the tide." But because there is no single solution, ecoagriculture
is hard to define. Success, McNeely says, "looks like diversity." He and
Scherr have identified six broad ecoagriculture strategies:

1. Reduce habitat destruction by increasing productivity and sustainability on
existing farmlands. In Brazil, dairy farmers reforested former pastures in
exchange for technical assistance that improved fodder and silage on
remaining grazing lands.

2. Enhance wildlife habitat on farms and link uncultivated spaces with wildlife
corridors. Costa Rican farmers planted windbreaks to shelter cattle,
reducing calf mortality and providing a preferred food to wild parakeets,
which had been raiding coffee plantations. Both beef and coffee yields
improved.

3. Establish protected areas near agricultural lands and fisheries. Philippine
fishers established "no take" reserves, where all fishing was banned. In
nearby waters, the size, number, and species diversity of fish caught by
commercial fishers went up sharply

4. Mimic natural habitats by integrating productive perennial plants. In
Indonesia, rubber farmers mimicked wild forests by planting complex mixtures
of trees, shrubs, and food crops. The result was an economically sustainable
production of multiple crops and forests that contain significant
biodiversity -- up to 300 plant species.

5. Use farming methods that reduce pollution. The rice farmers of Yunnan
province cut fungicide use by mixing species.

6. Modify farm resource-management practices to boost habitat quality in and
around farmlands. California rice farmers have been flooding their fields
each fall, rather than burning rice straw. The straw decomposes, air
pollution is avoided, and millions of wetland migratory birds stop to feed
and rest.

The trick behind implementing ecoagriculture is to line up the incentives so
that both farmers and biodiversity come out ahead. Currently, about $375
billion a year is spent on farm subsidies, says McNeely, much of that in the
form of price supports that encourage farmers to overproduce, glut the
market, drive down prices, and hammer the environment in the process. "It's
not realistic to say 'let's do away with those subsidies,' but we could
redirect them," McNeely says. "We're beginning to see some of that." For
example, the European Union is subsidizing organic farming on 1.3 million
acres.

Achieving ecoagriculture won't be easy, though, because at bottom it is
about teaching people new ways to farm -- albeit the new ways often borrow
from traditional farming methods that worked with nature rather than against
it. "This is the beginning of a long-term initiative," says Scherr.

Proponents of ecoagriculture admit it has limits. But they also think this
is a teachable moment, a time when many farmers around the world are
desperate for alternatives to a system in which they depend too heavily on
chemical and petroleum inputs, produce a glut of food, and abuse their
surroundings.

"There's a great deal of desperation in the agricultural world," says
Scherr. "The real breakthrough will be in developing a new production system
in which society enjoys the environmental benefits, and the farmer gets the
benefits of a greater income. It's really got to come from finding ways to
kill three birds with one stone."
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Hal Clifford writes from Telluride, Colo., where he enjoys the biodiversity
of a backyard that has never known the indelicate touch of fertilizer,
pesticide, or lawnmower.